I broke the silence. “Can you get me copies of the ME’sreport, the lab work, photos, the whole nine yards?”
“Be a hell of a lot easier if you took the Colonel up on hisoffer. With the diplomatic courier angle, we can claim an interest. If the FBI doesn’t shove us all to oneside and clamp down in the name of National Security.”
“Forget about that state patrol job. I never wanted to be aboss. Bureaucratic baloney up the ass. I don’t even like giving orders tomyself.”
That drew another shrug, barely visible in the darkness. “Yourkarma. Like I said, we need you. Last I heard, the state hadn’t passed a lawthat says we can draft you.” She stood there in the shadows, silent. Then, “Iwonder where he was hiding for all those years.”
That question had been bothering me, as well. “Must have beenout of the country. Back when, we never went more than a year without hearingfrom him, seeing his MO. At that, I wonder if we found half his victims.Sometimes the bastard would call one of us up in the middle of the night andtell us where to look. Taunting.”
Cash was no dummy, not a thickskulled Watson to serve as afoil for my brilliant Holmes. She’d earned her rank and then some, a blackwoman in a white-male cop’s world. She jumped right over my words and finishedthe thought.
“To hell with where he went — why’d he come back? I can name acouple dozen places where he could play to his twisted little heart’s contentand nobody would care. Care? Hell, some countries, the government thugs wouldhire him.”
She stopped and stared at me. I stared back. She nodded asanother piece clicked into place. It didn’t make the jigsaw puzzle anyprettier, though.
“Be real useful ifyou could find out what John Doe in there was carrying.” I was the one who saidit, but we both hit the finish line together.
“Anything else I need to see?”
She thought about it for a moment and shook her head. “Nah.The city’s latest witch-sniffer knows his stuff. He just doesn’t have yourmemory.”
Sometimes I wished I didn’t have my memory. “I didn’trecognize him. Where’s he from?”
“Heard he went to Penn State on GI benefits and then got a jobwith the New Orleans force. Got tired of his weekly dose of vampire hoaxes andall-too-real Voodoo. Yankee white-boy, never got into that gris-gris world, notaste for gumbo or for chicory in his coffee. Name’s Pennington. Been up herefor two years now.”
Ouch. Two years on the local force, and I didn’t recognizehim. I’d been living under a rock since Maggie’s trial.
Cash read my mind. “Pull yo’ head out of yo’ ass, honkey.” She only revved up thatstreet-jive when she wanted to slap sense into someone. “Your girlfriendscrewed up and left her signature on a magical crime. You’ve been in a funkever since. Five other mages testified against Maggie Driscoll, and then therewas the physical evidence. You didn’t put her in the Big House. She put herselfthere.”
I couldn’t see any point in arguing, so I started hiking backto her cruiser. Everything else in Maggie’s case had been circumstantial. Theevidence could have pointed in ten different directions, pointed to tendifferent people. I had to be the one who tied it all up in one neat packagewith her name dangling from the bow.
I decided to change the subject. “What’s with the super-copcostume? Your colonel’s gone all starch and polish? Last time I saw you on acase, you were wearing a track suit and running shoes.”
“Recruit graduation at the Academy this morning, putting on ashow for the new kids. Boss said we had to looklike real cops, even if we think we’re prime-time TV prima-donnas. Heard thecall for this mess before I got home to change, then headed straight over toyour office when I saw what they’d found.”
Around the corner of the warehouse, the city cruisers andmobile lab still waited in spitting rain, flashers blinking blue light off thewalls and broken glass and wet pavement. It made a depressing scene, one that I’dwalked through about a hundred times too many, on my way to or from somethingAl Kratz or his spiritual kin left behind. Over twenty years of somethings. That was what had really burned me out.Maggie had just underlined it. The last straw, like I said.
Hell, Kratz hadn’t even been the worst. Top rank for that went to a perp we couldn’tprosecute, a “national security” case where the Feds confiscated our files anddamn near confiscated our brains as well. I was lucky to still be walking thestreet rather than living on some quiet island with a minder from the CIA orthe NSA running my shit through a gas-chromatograph to make sure I wasn’tslipping out chemically-coded messages through the sewer outfall.
I shook off those thoughts. Cash was staring at me, like she’dread my mind again. I wondered if she actually was sensitive, if the testing had missed something. The answer, ofcourse, was “no” — Cash was just a sharp and observant woman, sharp as a shinynew razor blade.
She lifted a hand off the cruiser door and waved an apology. “Look,man, I’m sorry to drag you into this. I know it hurts. If I could do the thingsyou do, I’d leave you dozing in the sun.”
I opened the passenger door and heaved myself inside, settlinginto that custom seat. “Yeah. And if you could do the things I do, you wouldn’tbe wearing that uniform. You’d be open to a couple-dozen attacks that won’t affecta normal person. And they’d never trust you with anything more important than theaccess codes to the copier. That’s why they ran you through testing until youwept blood before they’d let you on the unit. Your Colonel is blowing smokerings out his ass if he thinks he could ever get a trained wizard confirmed tocaptain on the State Patrol.”
To most people, we’re freaks. That is, if we’re notstraight-out Spawn of Satan complete with cloven
